TITS4TATS is Billy Slicks’ creative response to the alarming state of trans healthcare in the UK. The London-based artist trades tattoos for donations to dozens of surgery fundraising pages.
The idea for the project took shape earlier this year, during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Billy tells me that, during that time, they were “seeing friends whose fundraisers weren’t going anywhere, who were struggling”.
Although the national health service has a legal obligation to provide specialist care within eighteen weeks of a referral from a general practitioner, many trans patients wait years for a first appointment. The coronavirus pandemic has further increased waiting times and stalled medical transitions that were underway.
Without government support, many of the UK’s trans people have been left with no choice but to look to private healthcare. This has resulted in an ever-rising number of fundraisers to cover prohibitively high private treatment fees, with top surgeries costing up to £7,000.
Unable to donate to these fundraisers personally, Billy began thinking of other ways to help. Having been tattooing their friends for years, they created an Instagram page to share previous work and new designs and launched TITS4TATS – a new platform that, just six months on, is supporting dozens of trans people who are crowdfunding for gender-affirming surgeries online.
A few people have already met their goals. “It’s obviously not all down to me but it’s nice to see that progress on people and know that something’s happening,” Billy says. The project now includes a fundraiser for the artist’s own surgery. They didn’t have a fundraiser when it started, Billy explains: “It wasn’t for me.”
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Lou Ferreira | Radio Free (2020-12-27T08:00:04+00:00) Meet the trans artist trading tattoos for top surgeries. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/27/meet-the-trans-artist-trading-tattoos-for-top-surgeries/
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